Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

Poppy cultivation had become an agribusiness and the dealers for the Afghan drug barons now had technical advisers who were visiting Nangarhar to advise on the crop and the product, paying in advance, and so concerned about the health of their workers that they had given them face-masks to wear in the opium factories. Some said they even offered health insurance. This was capitalism on a ruthlessly illegal scale. And when I asked a European UN official how the world could compete with it, he drew in his breath. ‘Legalise drugs!’ he roared. ‘Legalise the lot. It will be the end of the drug barons. They’ll go broke and kill each other. But of course the world will never accept that. So we’ll go on fighting a losing war.’

Engineer Mahmoud would only shrug his shoulders when I repeated this to him. What could he do? I raised the subject of ‘Sheikh Osama’ for the third time. The Sheikh wanted to see me, I repeated. I was not looking for him. I was in Jalalabad at the Sheikh’s request. He was looking for me. ‘So why do you ask me to look for him?’ Engineer Mahmoud asked with devastating logic. This was not a problem of language because Mahmoud spoke excellent English. It was a cocktail of comprehension mixed with several bottles of suspicion. Someone – I did not want to mention the man in London – had told me to contact Mahmoud, I said. Perhaps he could tell the Sheikh that I was at the Spinghar Hotel? Mahmoud looked at me pityingly. ‘What can I do?’ he asked.

I sent a message through the Swedish UN soldier – he was the UN’s sole radio operator as well as one of its only two soldiers in Afghanistan – and he connected me to the only person in the world I really trusted. There had been no contact, I said. Please call bin Laden’s man in London. Next day a radio transmission message arrived, relaying the man’s advice. ‘Tell Robert to make clear he is not there because of his own wish. He is only replying to the wish of our friend. He should make it clear to the Engineer that he is only accepting an invitation. The Engineer can confirm this with our friend … Make it very clear he was invited and did not go on his own. This is the fastest thing. Otherwise he has to wait.’ Back I went to Engineer Mahmoud. He was in good form. In fact he thought it immensely funny, outrageously humorous, that I was waiting for the Sheikh. It was fantastic, laughable, bizarre. Many cups of tea were served. And each time a visitor arrived – a drugs control worker, an official of the local governor, a mendicant with a son in prison on drugs offences – he would be regaled with the story of the bareheaded Englishman who thought he had been invited to Jalalabad and was now waiting and waiting at the Spinghar Hotel.

I returned to the Spinghar in the heat of midday and sat by the lawn in front of the building. I had hidden in the same hotel sixteen years earlier, after Leonid Brezhnev had sent the Soviet army into Afghanistan, when I had smuggled myself down to Jalalabad and watched the Russian armoured columns grinding past the front gates. Their helicopters had thundered over the building, heavy with rockets, and the windows had rattled as they fired their missiles into the Tora Bora mountain range to the north. Now the butterflies played around the batteries of pink roses and the gardeners put down their forks and hoses and unspread their prayer rugs on the grass. It looked a bit like paradise. I drank tea on the lawn and watched the sun moving – rapidly, the movement clear to the naked eye – past the fronds of the palm trees above me. It was 5 July, one of the hottest days of the year. I went to my room and slept.

‘Clack-clack-clack.’ It was as if someone was attacking my head with an ice-pick. ‘Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.’ Ever since I was a child, I had hated these moments; the violent tugging of sheets, the insistent knock on the bedroom door, the screeching voice of the prefect telling me to get up. But this was different. ‘CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.’ I sat up. Someone was banging a set of car keys against my bedroom window. ‘Misssster Robert,’ a voice whispered urgently. ‘Misssster Robert.’ He hissed the word ‘Mister’. Yes, yes, I’m here. ‘Please come downstairs, there is someone to see you.’ It registered only slowly that the man must have climbed the ancient fire escape to reach the window of my room. I dressed, grabbed a coat – I had a feeling we might travel in the night – and almost forgot my old Nikon. I walked as calmly as I could past the reception desk and out into the early afternoon heat.

The man wore a grubby, grey Afghan robe and a small round cotton hat but he was an Arab and he greeted me formally, holding my right hand in both of his. He smiled. He said his name was Mohamed, he was my guide. ‘To see the Sheikh?’ I asked. He smiled but said nothing. I was still worried about a trap. The guide’s name would be Mohamed, wouldn’t it? He would suggest an evening walk. I could hear the later eyewitness evidence. Yes, sir, we saw the English journalist. We saw him meet someone outside the hotel. There was no struggle. He left freely, of his own accord. He walked out of the hotel gates.

I did, too, and followed Mohamed all the way through the dust of Jalalabad’s main street until we arrived next to a group of gunmen in a pick-up truck in the ruins of an old Soviet army base, a place of broken armoured vehicles with a rusting red star on a shattered gateway. There were three men in Afghan hats in the back of the pick-up. One held a Kalashnikov rifle, another clutched a grenade-launcher along with six rockets tied together with Scotch tape. The third nursed a machine gun on his lap, complete with tripod and a belt of ammunition. ‘Mr Robert, these are our guards,’ the driver said quietly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to set off across the wilds of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province under a white-hot afternoon sun with three bearded guerrillas. A two-way radio hissed and crackled on the shoulder of the driver’s companion as another truckload of Afghan gunmen drove up behind us.

We were about to set off when Mohamed climbed back down from the pick-up along with the driver, walked to a shaded patch of grass and began to pray. For five minutes, the two men lay half-prostrate, facing the distant Kabul Gorge and, beyond that, a far more distant Mecca. We drove off along a broken highway and then turned onto a dirt track by an irrigation canal, the guns in the back of the truck bouncing on the floor, the guards’ eyes peering from behind their chequered scarves. We travelled like that for hours, past half-demolished mud villages and valleys and towering black rocks, a journey across the face of the moon.

Out of the grey heat, there loomed the ghosts of a terrible war, of communism’s last imperial gasp; the overgrown revetments of Soviet army firebases, artillery positions, upended, dust-covered guns and the carcass of a burned-out tank in which no one could have survived. Amid the furnace of the late afternoon, there emerged a whole blitzed town of ancient castellated mud fortresses, their walls shot through with machine-gun bullets and shells. Wild naked children were playing in the ruins. Just the other side of the phantom town, Mohamed’s driver took us off the track and began steering across shale and hard rock, the stones spitting beneath our wheels as we skirted kilometres of fields that were covered in yellow dust. ‘This is a gift from the Russians,’ Mohamed said. ‘You know why there are no people working this ground? Because the Russians sowed it with thousands of mines.’ And so we passed through the dead land.

Once, as the white sun was sliding into the mountains, we stopped for the gunmen on the back to pull watermelons from a field. They scampered back to the trucks and cut them up, the juice dripping through their fingers. By dusk, we had reached a series of cramped earthen villages, old men burning charcoal fires by the track, the shadow of women cowled in the Afghan burqa standing in the alleyways. There were more guerrillas, all bearded, grinning at Mohamed and the driver. It was night before we stopped, in an orchard where wooden sofas had been covered in army blankets piled with belts and webbing and where armed men emerged out of the darkness, all in Afghan clothes and soft woollen flat hats, some holding rifles, others machine guns. They were the Arab mujahedin, the Arab ‘Afghans’ denounced by the presidents and kings of half the Arab world and by the United States of America. Very soon, the world would know them as al-Qaeda.